The Persian Abyss: The future of US-Iran relations

Realizing that for the first time in American history, the US president had been reduced to the role of Oliver Twist when he recently begged his Saudi counterpart to increase the output of oil is only indicative of the impotent state of the world's sole superpower. And as the American president, resembling a poor orphan boy, grudgingly lifted his proverbial bowl in hopes of an infrequent show of mercy from the jolly, oil-soaked Arab parish beadle, it has become all but appropriate to understand what seven years of a foreign policy based upon a comic-strip view of the world actually accomplishes.

Hopping from one Arab despot's lair to another in a farewell tour d'horizon of the Middle East, Bush's promise to "confront" Iran failed miserably- at one point in the UAE., the Sheikh of Dubai seemed so annoyed by Bush's calls to isolate his biggest trading partner, that he hurried one of his minions to fetch a prized desert hawk for his artless Western guest to play with until he boarded his plane. Yet for all extens and purposes, it is time now to understand that the destructive hurricane which was the presidency of George W. Bush is happily coming to an end and more importantly, what the future implications of the US-Iran relationship will look like for his successor.

The new realities of the Middle East make it incumbent upon the next American president to talk directly to his or her Iranian counterpart, which most likely will NOT be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This will mean that the two of them would embark into uncharted territory- having to meet, at some place and time, sit down, and discuss EVERY issue that these nations disagree over. This is a reality that many in the West will have to come to terms with.

The deterioration of Afghanistan (when this past weekend saw 80 dead in one day as a result of a suicide bombing), the Iraqi impasse (which contrary to neo-con folklore is still in a dire situation with no let up in violence and no political settlement is sight between the warring factions), and the possible implosion of Pakistan and Lebanon are calamities that Washington has proven, time and again, to be ill-equipped to deal with. Iran can, and if given the proper Grand Bargain will help in amending all of the above and recognize the existence of Israel, an offer that was already proposed by them 5 years ago yet was soundly rejected by the current American administration.

Now there are two outlooks upon a possible Iran-US rapprochement- the ideological and the pragmatic.

The ideological viewpoint will attempt to hold onto the tired, inane argument that everything and anything the United States has done within the last seven years, and by extension the last five decades, has somehow helped "to bring stability to the Middle East". To them, a fractured Iraq with millions of internally-displaced persons and a raging civil war is perceived to be as "winning the War on Terror". To them, the fact that Afghanistan exports five times the amount of heroin it once did when the Taliban ruled the country is merely an unintended consequence in the course of attaining a higher cause. The unremitting support given to backwards oligarchs, like the house of Saud and the National Democratic Party of Egypt, is consistently propagated by the ideologues as necessary evils while an American engagement with Iran is seen as "retreat", "surrender", or any other nonsensical tripe that virtually most sane human beings can't bring themselves to believe anymore.

The simple truth is that the United States has failed in everything it has attempted to accomplish in the Middle East- all of it being attributed to a fictitious sense of reality, always sacrificing short-term gains for long-term stability. And although the current sanctions on Iran are dramatically harming the average Iranian, they have not and will not sway the government - who views Washington as an existential threat - from changing its current behavior. In addition, unless the United States is willing to commit at least 10 million troops to invade Iran, no amount of money funneled to irrelevant "opposition groups", who have no constituency within the country, or "democracy movements" will be able to succeed in the West's hope for "regime change".

In the Israeli media, the ideologues who fear a coming top-level Iranian-American dialogue view it through the prism of WWII, always evoking Chamberlain's now infamous declaration of "peace in our time" and warn that all those who wish to have discourse with the Islamic Republic are optimistic pacifists who can not see the "real threat". These are the people who exemplify what I call the Czechoslovakia Syndrome, fearing that a Grand Bargain with Iran will be pernicious to Israeli security, and that in doing so, Israel will somehow suffer the same fate as that of the European nation, being sacrificed to an expansionary monster in hopes of a lasting cessation of hostilities.

However, none of the evocations of WWII historiography have any relevancy with the West's current dispute with Iran - different places, different circumstances, different times, different historical grievances, and ultimately different actors. Iran is not Nazi Germany, Israel is not Czechoslovakia, Ahmadinejad is not Hitler, and even in his most ambitious dream, the stumbling fool masquerading as the American president is by no means Churchill.

The pragmatists, even if those who at one time supported the Bush doctrine, have now reconciled themselves with the salient failings of a flawed policy and have now urged for a radical shift in America's approach in dealing with Iran.

In probably one of the most comprehensive and mature articles I have ever read in the Israeli press, Daniel Levy, adviser to former Israeli premier Ehud Barak, appealed for a much-needed American behavior shift in dealing with Iran, recognizing that "resigning ... to the unnecessary conclusion that Israel's fate is one of perpetual conflict, we ought to be more ambitious in our diplomatic reach" and that "Israel and the pro-Israel community should be encouraging comprehensive US-led engagement with Iran, not the opposite, and should help shape that dialogue, not lag behind it" [1].

The fact is that the "Palestine problem" is probably one of the least complex issues that America would be able to solve with Iran, if the former was offered a Grand Bargain. As a nation, Iran, its government, its people, and its future is wholly disaffected from whatever happens in the Levant- it has always used the impasse in the Peace Process for political fodder in garnering favor from the disenfranchised masses in the Arab world, most of which live under incompetent, archaic despots who are viewed by their people as nothing but lifeless American puppets who only are able to survive by reason of mankind's thirst for oil. In a future Grand Bargain, Hamas would be instantaneously sacrificed, never to receive a dime from Iran. Hizbullah, in turn, would be totally disarmed by Iran and be wholly infused into Lebanese politics - all of which was previously offered by the Islamic Republic in 2003.

Former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, and author of the now famous "Manifesto to the Arabs" [2], Yousef Ibrahim, has recently written a brilliant piece on how the American establishment has, for years, attempted to mollify militant wrath by appealing to powerless Arab dictators who have long lost control of terrorists they once helped create. In turn, the US has adopted a self-defeating policy of sanctions and war rhetoric towards the Islamic Republic, the only power within the region that truly has any influence over militant groups [3]. In doing so, the United States has attempted to outsource the failed Peace Process to Arab despots such as the Saudi potentate, the Egyptian dictator, and former Star Trek B-actor turned Jordanian King. Yet these superficial figures have no motivation in establishing lasting peace for if they were to do so, the real politk rhetoric which they use to sway their masses from the internal pathologies of their regimes would come to full light to their subjects.

As for Iran, the years of requests made by the American administration for the Islamic Republic to cease aiding Hamas and Hizbullah, to halt their meddling within Lebanon, and play a constructive role in Iraq and Afghanistan fall on deaf ears. The Islamic Republic's outlook towards today's Middle East is quite simple.

After 9/11, when supposedly the "world had changed", they offered their assistance to the US, which the Americans gladly utilized to eradicate the Taliban from Afghanistan (we must remember that the Taliban was initially more of an enemy to Iran than they were to the US). Iran was also party to the Bonn Agreement, a vital step in transitioning Afghanistan from a 25-year civil war to some semblance of calm. The Iranian government aided the transition period by supplying Washington with intelligence, investing millions into Afghanistan's ravaged infrastructure, and taking an active role in reaching out to the once warring factions within the country to create a unity government- all positive, rational, and ultimately nationalistic driven efforts.

However, in early 2002, the Bush administration showed that it had no intentions in pursuing a policy that would bring lasting peace to the region. Only weeks after the Bonn agreement, the American president, with the help of the most fanciful advisors, fabricated a half-baked symbolic construct known as the "Axis of Evil", coalescing together three vastly different countries that had nothing to do with 9/11 into a single cabal of wickedness. At the same time, the substratum that this cancer had developed out of what was conveniently ignored by the United States (i.e. American funding of medieval dictatorships within the Arab world, American hesitancy to confront such nations as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait from teaching a heretical version of Islam to their youth for decades, etc.).

To the average Iranian politician, especially those within the Khatami administration and the Supreme Leader, it was quite dumbfounding why the American government would somehow compartmentalize their country into a triangulation that would include a vehement anti-Iranian and hermetic megalomaniac with whom they had only tangential diplomatic relations.

Sure they supported Hizbullah, and at the time were only conducting dialogue with Hamas, but given the fact that all the 9/11 hijackers came from the Arab states who had vast diplomatic and military ties with the US, it was widely assumed within Teheran that a new cooperation with the United States may bring about an easing of tensions - a reality that Pakistan, with its virulent anti-American population and previous support for terrorism accompanied with a nuclear arsenal, ultimately experienced in the form of financial and military aid.

Yet, for the past 7 years the Bush administration has been openly calling for regime change within Iran, tightening financial sanctions, and in some instances supporting "opposition groups" such as the MKO, a terrorist cult that is responsible for the deaths of many average Iranians. And now after an abysmal failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States finds itself in a peculiar juncture.

The American president should have distinguished those parties who were genuinely cooperating with the US effort from those who were feigning assistance. George Bush had many chances to do so yet squandered them all on a false sense of global reality.

Of course, such a rapprochement with an ominous power is not unprecedented. The 1972 Nixon visit to China is emblematic of a mature, nuanced foreign policy. In a television interview late last year, Newsweek editor, Fareed Zakaria, fittingly pointed out that the current row with Iran should be based upon this successful model and not neo-con fantasies that have proven futile to date. He argues that China's Mao Zedong was "much more revolutionary" than the current Iranian president, actively supporting anti-American insurgents globally, killing American soldiers in Vietnam and Korea, and pledging to overturn the social order of the world, even if it meant the destruction of "half of mankind". And yet the American administration was able to meet with him and exchange grievances, ultimately enabling China to be introduced into the global economy by which they are inexorably tied to and benefit from. Many analysts have now correctly stated that what the United States could not accomplish with Vietnam through war, they succeeded through dialogue and trade.

It is this mechanism that will change the behavior of the Islamic Republic. I have always stated that those who run Iran, whether they are mullahs or the military, are rational, nationalistic, greed-driven people who have accumulated a great amount of wealth since their introduction into politics in 1979. And like other human beings, they are inclined to the finer things in life such as BMWs, Armani suits, mansions, international bank accounts, private jets, and the occasional mistress. These are NOT irrational people.

For the next American president, attempting to mend the tattered state of US foreign policy shall surely be a daunting task. However, given the right formula, such as the cessation of economic sanctions and security concerns, the Islamic Republic will prove to be another banal example of how capitalism ultimately triumphs.

The next few months are critical. As many in the West question the rationality of the Iranian leaders, many around the world question the sanity of the current American president. He has proven himself to be diplomatically incompetent and driven to war based upon innuendo, conjecture, and outright myth.

Rarely has the fate of an entire region of the world rested upon such an erratic individual. If 2009 arrives without any further conflict and his successor chooses to engage Iran through HIGH diplomatic channels, such as Nixon did, the future of the Middle East will not look as grim as the neo-cons have propagated.

[1] Change Iran's behavior, not its regime
[2] To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over - and they won. Now let's finally move forward